Kyle Roadman, EPUD General Manager
Emerald Customer-Owners,
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Seavey Loop! It’s been an exciting finish to the year, as we celebrated our 40th Anniversary and pushed forward on capital improvement projects across the District. As we turn the page on 2023, we’re excited about what’s to come in the year ahead.
I want to highlight two main areas of focus for EPUD in 2024: Reliability Improvements and New Customer Services.
Reliability Improvements
2024 marks the third full year of our major capital improvement initiative. In 2021, we borrowed $35 million in an effort to “harden” our distribution system to reduce outage frequency and duration. To date, we’ve worked through just over half of this money by completing hundreds of capital projects all across our service territory. This includes moving lines from overhead to underground, rebuilding existing overhead structures, replacing underground cable, building alternate feeds, and purchasing advanced devices to help us quickly use these backup sources.
In the coming year we’ll continue this work on a whole new set of projects. Look for our crews and contractors in your neighborhood putting your dollars to work! The highlights include:
- A major new transmission line connecting the Veneta/Fern Ridge areas to Cheshire/Junction City. This will helps us cover major demand growth in these areas and provide additional flexibility to shift feeds.
- A continued rebuild along McKenzie View to increase capacity. We expect to complete at least two phases of this project next year, which will allow us to feed the entire Mohawk Valley from the Coburg area within the next few years.
- A new underground tie line in the Creswell area to provide alternate feeds to the central and southern parts of our district. When completed, this will help reduce the duration of outages in this area.
In total, we expect to put at least $8.2 million into major system upgrades in 2024, which would mark the highest level to date. A full list of projects can be found in our 2024 Budget. Access it by clicking here.
New Customer Services
Our customers already have access to some of the most advanced tools in the industry, the result of recent investments in new technology systems. This includes a customer portal known as SmartHub, which allows any customer to view or pay your bill, analyze hourly energy usage, report an outage, and receive notifications from EPUD.
In 2024, we plan to expand on these services, with a focus on enhanced outage information. This includes access to a new mapping tool to provide a visual representation of outages when they occur. We also plan to offer enhanced communication on the status of outages, using SmartHub or text-messaging depending on customer preference.
I hope this gives you a sense of the continued progress we hope to make in the year ahead. As a not-for-profit, customer-owned utility we are laser focused on meeting your expectations. Please reach out any time and let us know how we’re doing.
Please stay safe,
